If you’re an up-and-coming software engineer, these AI roll-outs spell an eventuality you should accept ASAP.

Thousands of other engineers like you are all building products and services at lightning speed with AI tools.

We’re entering an era where, despite the ‘slop’:

• Good MVPs can be built in hours.

• Entire SaaS platforms can be managed and launched by one competent individual.

• getting your project to “launch-able MVP” status is now the baseline, not the ‘unfair advantage’ you’d usually fill in on your lean canvases.

The market will be flooded with solid products and solutions.

Instead of production being the primary bottleneck in most projects, A lot more importance is placed in getting the product noticed, competing amongst the thousands of similar products.

The New Bottleneck: Distribution, Marketing

When AI erases the production barrier, attention becomes a commodity that’s in every producer’s ‘most wanted’ list.

Even if your product is great, it’s competing in a sea of equally great alternatives.

If you think “better optimisation / execution” alone will win… it realistically won’t.

In this new environment:

• Marketing isn’t an afterthought.

• Brand, positioning, and timing matter as much as the product.

• The feedback loop between building and marketing needs to be instant.

Why Engineers Should Care About Marketing

Good marketing today is:

• Data-driven

• Iterative

• Automated (as much as possible)

You already have the mindset to excel at this. Instead of 0s and 1s, you are adapting your CI/CD, pipeline development, systematic problem solving to better sell to human beings.

How Solo or Early-Career Engineers Adapt

1. Design for distribution: Build in share-ability, referrals, and network effects from day one.

   
   

2. Shorten the loop: Ship → market → get feedback → iterate.

   
   

3. Automate marketing: Let AI (or pre-written) handle content, campaigns, and analytics so you can focus on strategy.

   
   

4. Invest in your brand: Your credibility can be a moat in a crowded market.

   
   

5. Start with the market, not the feature list: Ask “Who needs this and why” before “How do I build it?”

   
   

The Hard Truth

AI will soon make it possible for anyone to build almost anything.

The question won’t be “Can you build it?” but “Can you get people to care?”

If you master marketing as well as engineering, you won’t just keep up — you’ll lead.

The engineers who ignore this shift risk being outpaced… not by better coders, but by better communicators.

As someone who thinks in systems, I see this as the next skill gap to close.

Code builds the product.

Marketing builds the future of that product.

You need to go faster AND go farther.